


Because I could not stop for Death (He kindly stopped for me)

by Rei



Category: The Pacific - Fandom
Genre: Angst, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-26
Updated: 2012-11-26
Packaged: 2017-11-19 15:13:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,004
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/574684
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rei/pseuds/Rei
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Written for the prompt: Prompt: “Leckie/Hoosier, sharing cigarettes & conversation”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Because I could not stop for Death (He kindly stopped for me)

Sometimes Leckie thinks he’s going crazy.   
When he sleeps, he dreams. And when he dreams it’s a never ending circle of pictures, sensations, flashes, smells, and sounds. He’s a corpse rotting at the beach. He is body parts gently drifting in the water. He’s a fly eating dead flesh from a body covered with dried blood.   
In these dreams he knows he’s never going home. It doesn’t even matter if he survives or not; if he makes it home or not. He’s going to be part of this goddamn beach forever; part of the palms, part of the rotten coconuts, part of the blood soaking the sand, part of the bones drying in the sun. He has lost too many pieces of himself here to ever be whole again. 

The worst part is waking up. Waking up and realizing reality is the true nightmare.

He’s breaking at the seams.  
He’s losing his mind. 

At the beginning he writes a lot; poems, notes and letters, but it becomes more and more difficult with each passing day. The sentences stop making sense halfway through and the words lose all meaning; they become just random letters scribbled across paper. There are no words to describe what he sees and smells and feels.   
Sometimes he thinks it’s the worst thing about the war. It’s stealing the words right from his paper, right out of his mind, makes him mute and voiceless. Useless.

“You’re thinking too goddamn much.” Even without opening his eyes he recognizes the languid drawl as Hoosier’s voice. 

“Nothing _you_ could ever be accused of,” he replies.   
Hoosier sits down next to him, obviously not offended in the least, and Leckie hears the soft, rustling noise when Hoosier opens a pack of cigarettes. 

“Got a light?” 

Leckie is too tired to move. He feels as if he hasn’t slept in forever and whenever he closes his eyes he dreams in surreal; violent pictures that leave him exhausted. So he keeps just laying there in the sand, eyes closed and listening to the waves. “Matches are in my pocket.” 

A hand slides across his leg, boldly and without hesitation. Back at home, Leckie thinks distantly, this would be somewhat bizarre, guys touching each other so openly, comfortably. People would look. But not here.   
There’s no privacy left between guys who share the same space, breathe the same rotten air, catch the same diarrhea, and who sweat and bleed and piss on each other all the time. 

Put like that, it sounds bad; repulsive and disgusting, but it isn’t, not really.   
Sometimes he falls asleep in the foxhole next to Chuckler, arms and legs tangled together, with only enough space for a rifle between them. And sometimes Sid’s voice trembles when he reads letters of his best friend ( _Eugene. Seems like a nice kid, nice and sweet and incredibly naïve_ ) and in the middle of the night Leckie awakens from the soft, weeping noises Sid makes in his sleep.   
Nobody talks about it when you cry. But nobody laughs either. 

A hand touches his shoulder, briefly, casually, and eventually Leckie opens his eyes.   
The sky above him has become dark already.   
A lit cigarette dangles in front of his face; the tip looks ridiculously huge from up close. Hoosier’s face is blurred, a pale oval in the background, and Leckie has to blink once, twice before he is able to focus. 

He isn’t sure what to make of Hoosier. He never has.   
At first and second and third glance he seems to be remarkably detached and blasé about everything, as if it doesn’t really bother him how the people around him keep on dying and how they get bombarded every night by the Japs. His lazy drawl and little half-smile doesn’t exactly contradict this appearance.   
Today he’s not smiling so much. 

“You’re not looking so hot,” Leckie states. 

“Shut up. I look wonderful.” 

To be honest, Hoosier looks kind of shitty. He’s pale and sweaty; his lips are cracked and the all too familiar blanket hangs limply over his shoulders. He looks as if he hasn’t been getting much sleep either lately. (On the other hand – who has?) A second cigarette dangles loosely from his lips. 

Hoosier has a habit of putting two cigarettes between his lips, lighting them simultaneously and offering the second one to whoever is nearby. A lot of the time it’s Leckie. Sometimes Leckie thinks this is Hoosier’s way of showing that he cares. Sometimes he doesn’t know and sometimes he isn’t sure if Hoosier cares about anything at all. 

It’s a nice kind of habit though, Leckie thinks almost dreamily, something warm and strangely familiar in a more than hostile environment and somehow it feels…personal coming from Hoosier. _Especially_ coming from Hoosier. He isn’t exactly a sharing-and-caring-kinda guy. Out of all the guys he’s the one that Leckie knows the least. And also is the one that Leckie understands the least. 

“You’re probably contagious,” Leckie adds, still not moving. 

Hoosier shrugs unconcernedly. It looks almost like a shiver. “You really worried about catching malaria?” 

“Kind of, yes.” 

“More worried than, let’s say, the Japs blowing your brains out?” 

Leckie sighs and feels a smirk pulling at the corners of his mouth. He takes the cigarette from Hoosier’s trembling fingers ( _too hot, too clammy_ ) and places it between his own lips.   
“Probably not,” he admits. 

“Thought so.”   
Leckie watches his cheeks hollowing out as he inhales, lips curved around the cigarette, eyes half-lidded. He looks tired and exhausted and less guarded than usual. 

In moments like this, Leckie gets curious. It makes him want to ask. All these silly little things he wonders about sometimes.   
“ _Do you have a girl at home?’ A best friend?_ ” or “ _What is your family like? Are they fucked up like mine? Are you a momma’s boy? Daddy’s favorite? The black sheep?_ ”   
“ _Is there anything that means something to you?_ ”   
Or “ _Do you wake up sometimes, in the middle of the night and feel as if you’re smack in the middle of the universe and for a second you can’t even breathe, because the universe is so huge and you are so tiny and it makes you realize your own insignificance?_ ”   
Because yes, Leckie does think about crazy stuff like that all the damn time, even now. 

But he doesn’t. He doesn’t ask any of these questions. 

“I know I’m quite marvelous, but if you keep starring at me like that I start blushing like a princess. You’re going to write a poem about me, Leckie?” Hoosier smiles, eyes closed blissfully as he exhales. 

Under different circumstances Leckie would’ve grinned and joked about how Hoosier is the most hideous creature he ever met and how’s he going to write Vera about how disgusting he’s being.   
But what he says instead is: “I think I’m going crazy.” 

Hoosier cocks his head and opens his eyes. He watches him contemplatively, cigarette dangling lazily between his fingertips.   
“You plan on swimming across the pacific back home?” 

“No.” 

“Or putting a gun to your head? Swallowing a bullet?” 

“No.” 

Hoosier pauses. “Actually this might be considered perfectly sane under these circumstances.” 

“I’m not joking.” 

Hoosier sighs and sucks at the cigarette again. “You never are, Luckie. That might be your problem. You’re so goddamn serious all the time.” 

Leckie watches the smoke curling around him.   
He might be too serious, but Hoosier never is. He always looks so calm and at peace with himself and his surroundings. If it weren’t for the blanket and his generally unkempt appearance he could as well be sitting in a café on Main Street. 

“Don’t you think about death sometimes?” Leckie asks, because he has to. Because sometimes he wants to grab Hoosier, wants to shake all that aloof calm out of him and yell at him until he gets it. Gets what? Leckie has no idea. 

“I do,” Hoosier nods serenely. “But he better not think about me yet.” 

This startles a surprised laugh out of Leckie. He takes a drag on his cigarette, inhaling deeply. “Now you almost sounded like Emily Dickinson. Who would’ve thought?” 

Hoosier raises an eyebrow. “I did?” 

“ _Because I could not stop for Death_ ,” Leckie recites from memory. “ _He kindly stopped for me. The carriage held but just ourselves…and Immortality._ ” 

Hoosier looks at him for a long moment, before he slowly shakes his head. “Of course you like Emily Dickinson, you morbid fucker. God forbid you might actually like something funny and entertaining for once.” 

Leckie exhales and hides his smile behind the smoke. He can feel Hoosier watching him, but he doesn’t look back and watches the first stars appear above him instead. 

Eventually Hoosier sighs, almost annoyed.   
“Yes, sometimes I think about death. Sometimes I think we’re all doomed to die and that a quick death would be certainly kinder than to rot in this shit hole. Happy now?” He rolls the cigarette between his fingertips ponderingly. “Does that make you feel any better? Any less crazy?” 

“Not really.”  
That’s a lie. It’s actually strangely comforting listening to Hoosier bitch at him.   
It reminds Leckie of nights spent together in their holes, getting shot at. Nights full of terror and noise and people screaming. It reminds him of Hoosier lying next to him during all these chaos, tightly pressed to the ground, his voice murmuring soft reassurances to the dog or bitching at Leckie to ‘ _goddamn, hold still already!_ ’.   
Maybe that’s why he hasn’t been sleeping. Maybe that’s what’s been missing those last few nights. Not the bombs obviously and not the Japs. 

Reaching for the blanket Leckie gets a hold of a corner and jerks.   
“What?” Hoosier frowns at him. 

“You look like shit. Get down here,” Leckie orders. “I’m tired of looking up at your ugly mug.” 

Hoosier sighs, tosses the cigarette away and lets himself get dragged to the ground next to him obediently. He isn’t usually this compliant, so he must feel pretty miserable. Or maybe he’s only missing the damn dog who used to curl up beside him. 

Hoosier’s head ends up on Leckie’s shoulder. His skin is far too hot and his breath feels moist on his neck. Still it’s a lot more comfortable than Leckie has been for a while. 

“I’ll write a poem about you tomorrow,” he says and he’s only half-joking. “As soon as I’ve found something that rhymes with ‘annoying’.” 

“Enjoying,” is the prompt reply. 

“Right. I think I need something more in the lines of ‘destroying’.” 

Hoosier exhales with a shudder that might’ve been a laugh and Leckie can feel his whole body relax against him. He barely trembles anymore.   
“Shut up and get some sleep, Leckie,” he murmurs. “You get grumpy if you don’t get enough sleep and we can hardly stand you anyway.”

Leckie snorts, but he feels something warm and soft unfurling in his chest.   
Might be malaria. Might be Hoosier.   
Sometimes it’s hard to differentiate between the two.   
So he did notice after all. 

‘ _God forbid you might actually like something funny and entertaining for once._ ’  
 _But I do_ , he thinks peacefully, almost amused. _I like you._

Maybe all these questions he constantly wants to ask…maybe they don’t mean anything. Not here. After all it’s about the people they used to be a lifetime ago. But they aren’t. Not anymore. So it doesn’t even matter. What matters is who they are now and most of all it matters that they’re together. 

“How does it end?” Hoosier asks sleepily and shifts a little closer. 

“What?” 

“The poem. The depressing one.”

“Oh.” Leckie shrugs. “Well, she goes with Death and she…dies.” 

Hoosier makes a scoffing noise and mutters something that sounds like “Should’ve shot Death in the face”. 

Leckie smiles.   
“ _Since then – 'tis Centuries – and yet / each feels shorter than the day_ ,” he quotes softly. “ _I first surmised the horses' heads / were toward eternity._ ”

He gets an elbow in his ribcage for his trouble.   
“Oh, go to fucking sleep, Leckie.” 

He does.


End file.
